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Online program goes undergrad
The Office of Distance Education, in coordination with Metropolitan College and the College of General Studies, is preparing to launch a sixth online program in January.
MET Dean Jay Halfond says the Executive Undergraduate Degree Completion Program is geared toward “mature individuals who never completed their undergraduate degree.”
The idea behind the program, he says, is giving adult students the chance to return to a liberal arts education later in life. “So many of us at 18 years old don’t really appreciate the humanities, the sciences,” says Halfond. “Sometimes we learn when we are in our 30s and 40s how wonderfully important they are, and we don’t have an opportunity to take advantage of it.”
Halfond says the University “flipped the idea of when one should study liberal arts” by developing the 16-course distance education program.
Students in the program will study a balanced curriculum of social science, humanities, and natural science courses that focus on a particular aspect of a field as a lens for learning the field’s issues, methods, and overarching theories, rather than focus on broad overviews.
CGS Dean Linda Wells says the program will use a CGS model and contain interdisciplinary courses. Because of that, several of her faculty will take part in the program. In choosing classes, she says, “we tried to find topics that are broad enough, that we thought would be of interest to people at the junior and senior level of a bachelor’s degree.”
Some of the new courses include Philosophy Through Film: Knowledge, Ethics, and Personal Identity; Manipulating Life: The Science and Ethics of Biology; The Essay: History, Theory, and Practice; Food Stuff: A Taste of Biology; and The Meaning of America: People, Identity, and the Conflict That Built a Nation.
“We want to offer a high-quality BU education to those who may not have access to academic institutions that can provide that kind of education,” says Halfond.
Distance education programs expand degree possibilities, meet growing market
17
September 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations